To write on cricket tha wants to watch it

The Lonely Spy : Lori and the Chameleons

On a slightly lighter note something about the return of the snow put me in mind of the following single which I recently rediscovered – literally so, as it was at the back of a cupboard. I was always very fond of it and its sister single Touch, which has a Japanese theme.

Lori and the Chameleons were the brainchild of Bill Drummond and Dave Balfe of Zoo Records, both of whom were to go on to other things – burning money, flinging dead sheep around, managing Blur and so on, but I don’t think either of them ever bettered this. Lori was, I believe, the secretary at Zoo Records, in so far as they had such a thing, and seems to have quit while she was ahead. Bill Drummond, a Son of the Manse, spent much of his childhood in Corby, so we could just about claim him as a local author!!! , if we felt so inclined.

The song is a reminder of the days when “Eastern Europe” was a far off exotic place, with which we in England had little contact. The younger generation may find this hard to imagine.

2 thoughts on “The Lonely Spy : Lori and the Chameleons”

I think it’s a bit early for a band like this to have had a video (it’s from 1980). It looks rather like Kettering station at 7.15 this morning (where I spent an amusing half hour or so) but it says that it’s a “recently discovered film of Moscow in 1908”. I thought I spotted Trotsky somewhere towards the end, but it was probably just some bloke with a beard and glasses.